Lena Dunham Interviews Gloria Steinem

The author, activist, and legendary feminist opens up to the Girls star about her new travel memoir, befriending her exes, and why she's never stopped exploring.

By
Lena Dunham

Nov 19, 2015

Douglas Friedman

It's rare to meet someone who lives up to your expectations, much less surpasses them. As I've learned again and again over the span of my short professional life, we are often disappointed by figures we consider deeply important—but let's save that for the memoir one writes at age 80. Speaking of memoirs and meeting your idols: Gloria Steinem wrote a gorgeous one, My Life on the Road, and Gloria is more magical, more profound, and more lovely than I could ever have imagined. She hosted me in the garden-floor office of her New York duplex, where the air conditioner was broken but she did not sweat, and she showed me her collection of Native American belts, and she told me what to read and who to Google, and she displayed a terrifically twisted sense of humor, and she actually asked questions. I will always remember this afternoon as one of the most beautiful of my life, spent beside a formative feminist influence who generously lets us know that she is still learning herself. That's how alive she is.

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Lena Dunham: I heard that you went to Africa for your 80th birthday last year, which is the most mind-boggling thing. For my 24th birthday I stayed inside. Your book makes it clear that travel is in your blood. And I love your chapter on not driving—I don't drive either.

Gloria Steinem: Oh, that's great. Hop on!

LD: I love to be driven. But I feel so much pressure, especially from men in my life, who are constantly telling me they are going to teach me how to drive. Was there a moment in your life when you decided it wasn't a skill you needed to have?

GS: It was gradual. I kept thinking I was going to go downtown and get a license, and I just never did, because I just never needed to drive. We live in New York, where it's possible to get by without driving. And when I travel I'm always being greeted and driven by folks or the organizing committee or something. I realized after I started this book about being on the road that there was something ironic about it. However, I was rescued by Jack Kerouac, who didn't know how to drive either. But it's unusual for me to find another person who doesn't drive.

LD: I've almost made a political act out of never getting my license. Failing my driver's test sent me into a near psychotic depression that made me realize I never needed to engage with driving again.

GS: Yes. Especially parking, that's the worst.

LD: The dedication in your book, to the doctor who gave you an abortion, gave me full-body chills. How long had you been thinking about the concept of revealing his identity?

GS: I often thought about him, but because he asked me not to reveal his name, it always stuck with me as a prohibition. And then it dawned on me that he is long dead, and this is a different day, and it's time to thank him.

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LD: And he's a hero now, not a criminal.

GS: He's a hero.

At 30, attending a party for Lyndon B. Johnson

Robert Walker

LD: These days feminism has entered the zeitgeist—you can even find underwear with the word "feminist" across the butt [Note from Dunham: I was wearing a pair when I wrote the intro to this piece after the interview.] People ask me all the time, "How do you feel about Beyoncé putting the word 'feminist' behind her?" And my feeling is, always it's great. What could hurt us about another woman identifying as a feminist in a new and exciting way?

GS: Right. I think it's great to see her getting behind it. I've never really talked to Beyoncé, though I would like to. I was there when she did the Chime for Change concert in London [in 2013], and when she came onstage she said to the audience, which was mostly women, I know life is hard, but we're together. And for the next hour you're safe. So she had me at hello. And then her husband came out midway through, and he sang one verse of her song with her, kissed her on the cheek, and left. I thought, "Okay, Frank Sinatra would not have done that with one of his wives. It would have been his show." So seems like progress to me! Beyoncé was a professional performer at such a young age, and it hasn't been that easy for her to be out in the world. It looks to me like she's doing the best she can.

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LD: How have you dealt with the inevitable attacks that come from being a face of such a complex movement? Did it ever make you want to take a nap for a week?

GS: It's not as bad as it used to be. At first it was really quite painful, and there have been some pretty bad times. But now I've developed guidelines to deal with it. I try with varying degrees of success to say, "Please do not call me an icon." I try to use my first name and not my whole name, because somehow it sounds friendlier. I don't show up for photographs or television shows or panels if they're all white. Sometimes people say women are our own worst enemies, but I always say, "No, we're not." Even if we wanted to be, we don't have the power to be. Things are better now, I think, because there's much more understanding that we're addressing a group problem, not an individual problem. With advancing age, I've had people saying to me, "Who are you passing the torch to?" And I knew it made me mad, but I didn't quite know what to say. And so finally I figured out that, wait a minute, I'm not giving up my torch.

At her 50th birthday party.

WireImage

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LD: "I'm very alive, and I'm in Milwaukee riding an elephant, thank you very much."

GS: Yes. I'm using my torch to light the torches of other people. Because the very idea that there's one torch is bullshit. No wonder we don't know where we're going. Everybody needs a torch to know where you're going.

LD: Over your incredibly long career, how have you managed to avoid the kind of emotional fatigue that comes with working hard to create change and sometimes not getting the results you want?

GS: In the very beginning, I was more subject to burnout, because I think burnout is a function of naïveté. But if you realize that this is a lifelong endeavor, you can pace yourself, physically and emotionally. I don't know that anything's a cure, but there are two helps. One is accepting that this is a lifetime project, and not being naive about the depth of what we're trying to do. And the second, for me, is understanding the means and the ends. So if you have a movement that is running, running, running, you'll get an end that is running, running, running. If you have a movement that has time for jokes and poetry and love, you'll have that in the end. So you have to build it in along the way. You can't kill people to save the village.

LD: Is there something about being the age you are that gives you a kind of calm or understanding that you didn't have before?

GS: Right now I'm fully occupied trying to make myself realize my age. I tell everyone in the world my age because I don't believe it. I'm not sure we know what age looks like. When I turned 40, some kindhearted reporter told me, "You don't look 40." And I said, "But this is what it looks like. How would you know? We've been lying to you for years." But I also know I could not possibly get along without my chosen family of friends, mostly women but men too. This is a big one that I try to tell kids on campuses: Your old lovers turn into your family.

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Steinem at 81, in 2015

Annie Leibovitz

LD: I'm worried my old lovers hate me too much for that.

GS: The question is if you ever actually not only loved but liked each other. It takes a few years to get over whatever the imbalance was, but the truth is, the two of you shared something that no one else knows. And you'll always have that. That's not going to go away.

"I tell everyone in the world my age because I don't believe it."

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LD: Switching gears, women's media is in such a different place now than when you started Ms. magazine, which continues to evolve. How do you feel about the state of women's media right now?

GS: Well, obviously the Internet is a bright spot, if women can use it. For those who have access, it's a magic gift. You can use it in physical safety in your home—you don't have to go out; it doesn't charge tuition. So I would say it's mostly a plus. But we just need to remember that it's a medium, not a message.

LD: On the topic of the Internet, you've had such incredible things to say about pornography in the past. I love your description of the difference between pornography and erotica.

GS: Oh, I'm so glad, because we've managed to get across that rape is different from sex and that it's violent, but we haven't managed to get across that pornography is different from erotica—that former is coercive, and the later is mutual. I always say to guys in audiences, "You know, cooperation is so much better than domination, you just can't even dream." We want to make a T-shirt that says, "Eroticize equality." And the human body is not obscene, excuse me.

Steinem at a Women Against Pornography conference in 1979.

Getty Images

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LD: What's obscene is treating images of sexual assault like they're images of consensual sex, and not making those lines clear. As someone who gets naked on television, I always know that when I go to my set I'm making my rules and showing myself in my own context.

GS: When you see a photograph of a woman who's nude or seminude, you can always tell by her attitude what it was taken for.

LD: Another huge civil rights conversation right now is trans identity and gender fluidity, which is becoming very intertwined with feminism. How can we be inclusive while also acknowledging what is challenging about being born biologically female?

GS: I don't think I have the answer. But there's a difference between the struggle over controlling women's bodies and therefore controlling the means of reproduction—which is not going to go away—and gender, which is something that was invented in order to control the means of reproduction. I hope that we will one day change society to fit the unique individual, not the unique individual to fit society, but we all are in this place, and we're all trying to find our own solutions, and we need to support each other in those solutions.

"We want to make a t-shirt that says 'Eroticize equality.'"

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LD: Beautifully said. Now, a slightly less heady question but an answer I desperately need: As a lifelong traveler, how do you pack?

GS: Poorly.

LD: I'd think by now you would be the queen of packing.

GS: I have changed over time. I used to pack in my briefcase. I had a canvas briefcase that I loved; I would put in a change of underwear, corduroy jeans, and those turtleneck bodysuits. And that was it. I did that for years. I would just wear the same thing and come home and burn my clothes or something. Then even I got tired of that, so I began to have suitcases. I just try never to take anything I can't carry.

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